Gigabyte Gives us our First Taste of X470 with the Aorus Gaming 7, Great Audio Please?

I hate living vicariously through others, but I couldn’t get to CES this year so I have no choice. PC Perspective managed to answer my one major question though, so I’ll point you in their direction for the meatier details of the new motherboard after this. I’ve been waiting for Aorus to give us a Gaming 7 AMD board for a while now and I’m not completely surprised that it’s coming to the next chipset in the Ryzen family. The Aorus X470 Gaming 7 has plenty of cool features and a great VRM heatsink, but I really hope they do a very important thing with the built in audio.

Right off the bat, we can see that we’ll have built in WiFi connectivity and the M.2 heatsinks look great. Cooling relies on surface area and these covers actually have fins to help dissipate NVMe heat production. Speaking of surface area, it feels like it’s been a real long time since I’ve seen actual fins on the VRM heatsinks. Even the smallest amount of airflow will make a much larger impact in keeping the power delivery cooler for overclocking, which happens to have 10+2 phases. The only thing I wouldn’t mind seeing changed is a black powder coated finish on the heatsinks, which I believe would look a little nicer, but that’s just a matter of personal preference. What I REALLY hope for on this board though, is that they are going to use a very specific audio chipset.

PC Perspective said there wasn’t details on the audio yet, so I’m going to dive into what I hope happens here. Take a look at the two thumbnails above and click on them to make them larger, if you need to. These are both taken from specs lists on different boards on the Aorus website. The one on the left should look very familiar. The audio chipset is the Realtek ACL1220 codec. Sure, some boards add Sound Blaster software features to the codec, but it’s still just the same old Realtek one that sounds alright and is on just about every gaming motherboard in existence recently. The spec on the right however, is something I’ve only seen on very particular Aorus motherboards, i.e. the Z270X Gaming 7 I reviewed before. The Creative Sound Core 3D chip sounds about twice as good as the Realtek ACL1220. Sure, this will also rely on your speakers, but I haven’t had a motherboard that comes close to sounding as good as when Aorus offers this specific sound chip. Gigabyte, if you’re seeing this at all, please give me an AMD board with Creative Sound Core 3D!

There’s quite a bit more going on with this board than I mentioned, but I’m going to assume you’ll either figure it out by looking at the pictures, or by heading over to PC Perspective’s link below and reading the details they have. It looks like the X470 motherboards are going to release with Ryzen 2 in April, so I’m sure we’ll get more technical details then. I feel like I’m getting closer to the end of the real interesting things that happened at CES 2018, but stay posted because there’s a couple more things you’ll likely want to know about.

About the Author

Josh Jackson

Needless to say I love computer hardware. With my reviews, I never forget what it's like trying to find parts on a tight budget and how excited I am about any new component I get my hands on. If there was a good effort in the design, then I'll find a reason why each component is great for someone!